The cloudy layers of modern-day programming

The bad part of how cloud services change the way of programming:

Modern programming is becoming complex, uninteresting, full of layers that just need to be glued. It is losing most of its beauty. In that sense, most programming is no longer art nor high engineering (most programs written at big and small corporations are trivial: coders just need to understand certain ad-hoc abstractions, and write some logic and glue code).

--- Antirez

“There’s the change that I’m really worried about: that the way a lot of programming goes today isn’t any fun because it’s just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else’s software and start it up. It doesn’t have much creativity. I’m worried that it’s becoming too boring because you don’t have a chance to do anything much new. Your kick comes out of seeing fun results coming out of the machine, but not the kind of kick that I always got by creating something new. The kick now is after you’ve done your boring work then all of a sudden you get a great image. But the work didn’t used to be boring.”

--- Donald Knuth

Ref: The cloudy layers of modern-day programming